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CWBR: What sparked your interest in the relationship between slaveholders and their management techniques? What brought you to this project? CR: Well, I suppose it was a moment of surprise that got me started on my research. I had gone to graduate school interested in researching the history of big business. Basically, what happens when big businesses got really large? And, how did that change the relationship between business owners and the people that work for them? And, along the way to studying that, I started look at account books. And I had looked at lots of northern account books for textile mills, and for iron forges, all the places that you think you should begin if you want to study big business. And then I looked at one of the first copies, I'd ever seen of Thomas Affleck's Plantation Records and Account Book, which is a pre-printed all-in-one blank book meant for southern slave plantations. And this book was way above average for what I had seen among the northern records. Not only that, but as I started to look, it turns out that lots of plantations use this, some of them were as big, or bigger, than a lot the factories that I had been looking at. So, I started to think that if you wanted to study management practices at scale, slave plantations would be an interesting place to start. And, it was particularly surprising because conventional business histories haven't paid that much attention to slavery.